Last week sitting in The Cutaway at Barangaroo, a place that I’ve been so many times before and seen “dressed up” is many different ways – with a cardboard city, with hundreds of yogis, with thousands of white balls converting it into a dry beach. But for Aurora Eora, the space was mostly physically empty and yet it was transformed. It became a space to linger in, to reflect in, to close your eyes and be in (and in my case a space to get lost in a drawing in.) What made it so? What changed this big cavernous space, made people want to walk slowly to its centre and sit down? Lie down? Stop?

It was music.

The voices of the Australian Children’s Choir echoed through the vast interior reminding me of monks singing acapella incantations in a sacred space. With speakers placed in a circle facing the centre of The Cutaway (to which we were encouraged by a pathway made up of strings of electric bulbs, like giant fairy lights, standing in for church candles), voices and rich harmonies washed over you from all directions. People sat and looked about. Looked up at the ceiling, looked at the rock cliff face, strolled quietly up and down. There was nothing much to take a selfie with, it was just a quiet place to linger and reflect.

(Later as I wandered over the hilltop I heard the music again, this time drifting out of the large vent that opens at the top of The Cutaway. Again, it altered the mood of the people who heard it, turning the Frisbee players into ballet dancers as they spun and leapt. It called a gentle invitation to curious passers-by to try and locate the source of music – like a benign Pied Piper.)

And later, as I drove somewhere or other, I was listening to RN and caught the extraordinary story of Andrew Schulman who created Medical Musicians after music saved his life – literally. He was deep in a coma with nothing more to be done when his wife played his favourite piece of music (Bach’s St Mathew’s Passion) and the medical team watched in amazement as his vital signs changed before their eyes. They had verifiable and measurable scientific data that proved the power of music. Schulman went on to create Medical Musicians playing Bach and other carefully selected pieces to patients in trauma wards as an “effective, non-invasive treatment” which “produced certain chemicals in the body” and “allowed the body to relax and heal”.

And I remember years ago, doing a meditation course and the teacher talking about “cleansing” your home by playing calming music in it – even if you were not there. Leaving on some classical music and going out and letting the sound change the energy.

And think about my students over the years and how they love “doing Relaxation” where I put on some Vivaldi or Bach and they lay down on the floor and closed their eyes for a few minutes. (If we missed it one day for some reason, they were quite put out). How kids with behavioural problems would choose listening to music as one of their strategies for calming down, settling themselves. They even started doing it at home, their parents reported back to me.

And even my cat Zadie, flopping down on this table on which I write, choosing to curl up right in front of the portable speaker from which Richard Tognetti plays the Bach Violin Concertos, the sound making the whole table reverberate, I can feel the physical sensation through my arms as I write.

There is something quite amazing about music. You can’t listen to it in the past or the future, it makes you “be” here in the present. Right here. What is your soundtrack for calm?

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Big Little Lies. I didn’t read it for a while but I kept hearing about it.

“It’s about a group of North Shore Mums,” said a friend from one of my old mothers’ groups, “We should have written our own version!”

“It’s about a school,” said a young colleague, “The parents are really crazy.”

“It’s about a single girl who finds love!” giggled a friend who until recently had been single (until she had found love).

One of the book clubs I belong to had read it but I had missed that meeting and the book. It seemed to have a got a big thumbs up though. I was really intrigued how everyone kept describing it differently. How it was about different things to different people.

I asked Fleur if she’d read it on one of our long phone calls where books often came up. She had not. A few weeks later however, she had.

“Oh my god!” she enthused. “You have to read it!”

And so eventually I did. On a short trip to Fleur’s house in Canberra. She pressed it into my hands and basically watched me read it. I laughed. A lot.

“Which part? Which part?” she kept asking and I kept telling.

But then I stopped laughing so much.

Celeste. It was Celeste.

Celeste, who had it all, perfect looks, perfect husband, beautiful house, beautiful children, overseas holidays. More money than she knew what to do with.

And a shameful secret.

For me, this book was about a woman deciding whether to leave a destructive relationship.

Celeste, who kept thinking about leaving, then changing her mind, planning to leave, then staying. The excuses, the justifications, the damning self-talk. The shame. She could not trust her own instincts, her own thoughts, her own eyes. The toxic relationship had become normal.

I talked to another friend about it who was in the middle of an awful divorce.

“There’s no way I could talk about that book at a book club,” she admitted. “No way I could listen to the flippant conversation about it.”

I’m kind of glad I missed that meeting too.

I just reread it (probably due to the hoop-la about the TV series – I haven’t seen it yet but the word is that it’s very good).

There’s a lot of humour in this story about a group of women encountering each other as their children start school. The competitive Mums, the bitchiness, the small events that get blown out of all proportion and become major dramas. All the “types” seem to be covered – the New Age Mum, the career Mum, the ambitious Mum, the helicopter parent, the single Mum.

But all the characters have secrets, hidden dimensions behind their clichéd facades. I liked that too, because for all the snide remarks and petty back-stabbing, the women come together to protect and stand up for each other.